challenge facing mankind, and I have a
fundamental answer. The greatestchallenge facing mankind
is the challenge of distinguishing reality fromfantasy,
truth from propaganda. Perceiving the truth has always been achallenge
to mankind, but in the information age (or as I think of it,the
disinformation age) it takes on a special urgency and importance.We must daily decide whether the threats we
face are real, whether thesolutions we are offered will
do any good, whether the problems we'retold exist are in
fact real problems, or non-problems. Every one of ushas a
sense of the world, and we all know that this sense is in partgiven
to us by what other people and society tell us; in part generatedby
our emotional state, which we project outward; and in part by ourgenuine
perceptions of reality. In short, our struggle to determine whatis
true is the struggle to decide which of our perceptions are genuine,and
which are false because they are handed down, or sold to us, orgenerated
by our own hopes and fears.As an example of this challenge, I want
to talk today aboutenvironmentalism. And in order not to
be misunderstood, I want itperfectly clear that I believe
it is incumbent on us to conduct ourlives in a way that
takes into account all the consequences of ouractions,
including the consequences to other people, and theconsequences
to the environment. I believe it is important to act inways
that are sympathetic to the environment, and I believe this willalways
be a need, carrying into the future. I believe the world hasgenuine
problems and I believe it can and should be improved. But I alsothink
that deciding what constitutes responsible action is immenselydifficult,
and the consequences of our actions are often difficult toknow
in advance. I think our past record of environmental action isdiscouraging,
to put it mildly, because even our best intended effortsoften
go awry. But I think we do not recognize our past failures, andface
them squarely. And I think I know why.I studied anthropology in college, and one of
the things I learned wasthat certain human social
structures always reappear. They can't beeliminated from
society. One of those structures is religion. Today itis
said we live in a secular society in which many people---the bestpeople,
the most enlightened people---do not believe in any religion.But
I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche ofmankind.
If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in anotherform.
You can not believe in God, but you still have to believe insomething
that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of theworld.
Such a belief is religious.Today, one of the most powerful
religions in the Western World isenvironmentalism.
Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choicefor
urban atheists. Why do I say it's a religion? Well, just look at thebeliefs.
If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in facta
perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefsand
myths.There's an initial Eden, a paradise, a state
of grace and unity withnature, there's a fall from grace
into a state of pollution as a resultof eating from the
tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actionsthere is
a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners,doomed
to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now calledsustainability.
Sustainability is salvation in the church of theenvironment.
Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-freewafer
that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.Eden,
the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday---theseare
deeply held mythic structures. They are profoundly conservativebeliefs.
They may even be hard-wired in the brain, for all I know. Icertainly
don't want to talk anybody out of them, as I don't want totalk
anybody out of a belief that Jesus Christ is the son of God whorose
from the dead. But the reason I don't want to talk anybody out ofthese
beliefs is that I know that I can't talk anybody out of them.These
are not facts that can be argued. These are issues of faith.And
so it is, sadly, with environmentalism. Increasingly it seems factsaren't
necessary, because the tenets of environmentalism are all aboutbelief.
It's about whether you are going to be a sinner, or saved.Whether
you are going to be one of the people on the side of salvation,or
on the side of doom. Whether you are going to be one of us, or one ofthem.Am I exaggerating to make a point? I am afraid
not. Because we know alot more about the world than we
did forty or fifty years ago. And whatwe know now is not
so supportive of certain core environmental myths,yet the
myths do not die. Let's examine some of those beliefs.There is no Eden. There never was. What was
that Eden of the wonderfulmythic past? Is it the time
when infant mortality was 80%, when fourchildren in five
died of disease before the age of five? When one womanin
six died in childbirth? When the average lifespan was 40, as it wasin
America a century ago. When plagues swept across the planet, killingmillions
in a stroke. Was it when millions starved to death? Is thatwhen
it was Eden?And what about indigenous peoples,
living in a state of harmony with theEden-like
environment? Well, they never did. On this continent, thenewly
arrived people who crossed the land bridge almost immediately setabout
wiping out hundreds of species of large animals, and they did thisseveral
thousand years before the white man showed up, to accelerate theprocess.
And what was the condition of life? Loving, peaceful,harmonious?
Hardly: the early peoples of the New World lived in a stateof
constant warfare. Generations of hatred, tribal hatreds, constantbattles.
The warlike tribes of this continent are famous: the Comanche,Sioux,
Apache, Mohawk, Aztecs, Toltec, Incas. Some of them practicedinfanticide,
and human sacrifice. And those tribes that were notfiercely
warlike were exterminated, or learned to build their villageshigh
in the cliffs to attain some measure of safety.How about the human condition in the
rest of the world? The Maori of NewZealand committed
massacres regularly. The dyaks of Borneo wereheadhunters.
The Polynesians, living in an environment as close toparadise
as one can imagine, fought constantly, and created a society sohideously
restrictive that you could lose your life if you stepped inthe
footprint of a chief. It was the Polynesians who gave us the veryconcept
of taboo, as well as the word itself. The noble savage is afantasy,
and it was never true. That anyone still believes it, 200 yearsafter
Rousseau, shows the tenacity of religious myths, their ability tohang
on in the face of centuries of factual contradiction.There
was even an academic movement, during the latter 20th century,that
claimed that cannibalism was a white man's invention to demonizethe
indigenous peoples. (Only academics could fight such a battle.) Itwas
some thirty years before professors finally agreed that yes,cannibalism
does indeed occur among human beings. Meanwhile, all duringthis
time New Guinea highlanders in the 20th century continued to eatthe
brains of their enemies until they were finally made to understandthat
they risked kuru, a fatal neurological disease, when they did so.More recently still the gentle Tasaday
of the Philippines turned out tobe a publicity stunt, a
nonexistent tribe. And African pygmies have oneof the
highest murder rates on the planet.In short, the romantic view of the
natural world as a blissful Eden isonly held by people
who have no actual experience of nature. People wholive
in nature are not romantic about it at all. They may hold spiritualbeliefs
about the world around them, they may have a sense of the unityof
nature or the aliveness of all things, but they still kill theanimals
and uproot the plants in order to eat, to live. If they don't,they
will die. And if you, even now, put yourself in nature even for a matter of
days,you will quickly be disabused of all your romantic
fantasies. Take atrek through the jungles of Borneo, and
in short order you will havefestering sores on your skin,
you'll have bugs all over your body,biting in your hair,
crawling up your nose and into your ears, you'llhave
infections and sickness and if you're not with somebody who knowswhat
they're doing, you'll quickly starve to death. But chances are thateven
in the jungles of Borneo you won't experience nature so directly,because
you will have covered your entire body with DEET and you will bedoing
everything you can to keep those bugs off you.The truth is, almost nobody wants to
experience real nature. What peoplewant is to spend a
week or two in a cabin in the woods, with screens onthe
windows. They want a simplified life for a while, without all theirstuff.
Or a nice river rafting trip for a few days, with somebody elsedoing
the cooking. Nobody wants to go back to nature in any real way,and
nobody does. It's all talk-and as the years go on, and the worldpopulation
grows increasingly urban, it's uninformed talk. Farmers knowwhat
they're talking about. City people don't. It's all fantasy.
One way to measure the prevalence of fantasy is to note the
number ofpeople who die because they haven't the least
knowledge of how naturereally is. They stand beside wild
animals, like buffalo, for a pictureand get trampled to
death; they climb a mountain in dicey weatherwithout
proper gear, and freeze to death. They drown in the surf onholiday
because they can't conceive the real power of what we blithelycall
"the force of nature." They have seen the ocean. But they haven'tbeen in it.The television generation expects
nature to act the way they want it tobe. They think all
life experiences can be tivo-ed. The notion that thenatural
world obeys its own rules and doesn't give a damn about yourexpectations
comes as a massive shock. Well-to-do, educated people in anurban
environment experience the ability to fashion their daily lives asthey
wish. They buy clothes that suit their taste, and decorate their apartments as
they wish. Within limits, they can contrive a daily urbanworld
that pleases them.But the natural world is not so
malleable. On the contrary, it willdemand that you adapt
to it-and if you don't, you die. It is a harsh,powerful,
and unforgiving world, that most urban westerners have neverexperienced.Many years ago I was trekking in the Karakorum mountains of
northernPakistan, when my group came to a river that we
had to cross. It was aglacial river, freezing cold, and
it was running very fast, but itwasn't deep---maybe three
feet at most. My guide set out ropes forpeople to hold as
they crossed the river, and everybody proceeded, oneat a
time, with extreme care. I asked the guide what was the big dealabout
crossing a three-foot river. He said, well, supposing you fell andsuffered
a compound fracture. We were now four days trek from the lastbig
town, where there was a radio. Even if the guide went back doubletime
to get help, it'd still be at least three days before he couldreturn
with a helicopter. If a helicopter were available at all. And inthree
days, I'd probably be dead from my injuries. So that was whyeverybody
was crossing carefully. Because out in nature a little slipcould
be deadly.But let's return to religion. If Eden
is a fantasy that never existed,and mankind wasn't ever
noble and kind and loving, if we didn't fallfrom grace,
then what about the rest of the religious tenets? What aboutsalvation,
sustainability, and judgment day? What about the comingenvironmental
doom from fossil fuels and global warming, if we all don'tget
down on our knees and conserve every day?Well, it's interesting. You may have
noticed that something has beenleft off the doomsday
list, lately. Although the preachers ofenvironmentalism
have been yelling about population for fifty years,over
the last decade world population seems to be taking an unexpectedturn.
Fertility rates are falling almost everywhere. As a result, overthe
course of my lifetime the thoughtful predictions for total worldpopulation
have gone from a high of 20 billion, to 15 billion, to 11billion
(which was the UN estimate around 1990) to now 9 billion, andsoon,
perhaps less. There are some who think that world population willpeak
in 2050 and then start to decline. There are some who predict wewill
have fewer people in 2100 than we do today. Is this a reason torejoice,
to say halleluiah? Certainly not. Without a pause, we now hearabout
the coming crisis of world economy from a shrinking population. Wehear
about the impending crisis of an aging population. Nobody anywherewill
say that the core fears expressed for most of my life have turnedout
not to be true. As we have moved into the future, these doomsdayvisions
vanished, like a mirage in the desert. They were neverthere---though
they still appear, in the future. As mirages do.Okay, so, the preachers made a mistake.
They got one prediction wrong;they're human. So what.
Unfortunately, it's not just one prediction.It's a whole
slew of them. We are running out of oil. We are running outof
all natural resources. Paul Ehrlich: 60 million Americans will die ofstarvation
in the 1980s. Forty thousand species become extinct everyyear.
Half of all species on the planet will be extinct by 2000. And onand
on and on.With so many past failures, you might
think that environmentalpredictions would become more
cautious. But not if it's a religion.Remember, the nut on
the sidewalk carrying the placard that predicts theend of
the world doesn't quit when the world doesn't end on the day heexpects.
He just changes his placard, sets a new doomsday date, and goesback
to walking the streets. One of the defining features of religion isthat
your beliefs are not troubled by facts, because they have nothingto
do with facts.So I can tell you some facts. I know you
haven't read any of what I amabout to tell you in the
newspaper, because newspapers literally don'treport them.
I can tell you that DDT is not a carcinogen and did notcause
birds to die and should never have been banned. I can tell youthat
the people who banned it knew that it wasn't carcinogenic andbanned
it anyway. I can tell you that the DDT ban has caused the deathsof
tens of millions of poor people, mostly children, whose deaths aredirectly
attributable to a callous, technologically advanced westernsociety
that promoted the new cause of environmentalism by pushing a fantasy about a
pesticide, and thus irrevocably harmed the third world.Banning
DDT is one of the most disgraceful episodes in the twentiethcentury
history of America. We knew better, and we did it anyway, and welet
people around the world die and didn't give a damn.I can tell you that second hand smoke
is not a health hazard to anyoneand never was, and the
EPA has always known it. I can tell you that theevidence
for global warming is far weaker than its proponents would everadmit.
I can tell you the percentage the US land area that is taken byurbanization,
including cities and roads, is 5%. I can tell you that theSahara
desert is shrinking, and the total ice of Antarctica isincreasing.
I can tell you that a blue-ribbon panel in Science magazineconcluded
that there is no known technology that will enable us to halt the rise of carbon
dioxide in the 21st century. Not wind, not solar, noteven
nuclear. The panel concluded a totally new technology-like nuclearfusion-was
necessary, otherwise nothing could be done and in themeantime
all efforts would be a waste of time. They said that when theUN
IPCC reports stated alternative technologies existed that couldcontrol
greenhouse gases, the UN was wrong.I can, with a lot of time, give you the
factual basis for these views,and I can cite the
appropriate journal articles not in whacko magazines,but
in the most prestigeous science journals, such as Science andNature.
But such references probably won't impact more than a handful ofyou,
because the beliefs of a religion are not dependant on facts, butrather
are matters of faith. Unshakeable belief.Most of us have
had some experience interacting with religiousfundamentalists,
and we understand that one of the problems withfundamentalists
is that they have no perspective on themselves. Theynever
recognize that their way of thinking is just one of many otherpossible
ways of thinking, which may be equally useful or good. On thecontrary,
they believe their way is the right way, everyone else iswrong;
they are in the business of salvation, and they want to help youto
see things the right way. They want to help you be saved. They aretotally
rigid and totally uninterested in opposing points of view. Inour
modern complex world, fundamentalism is dangerous because of itsrigidity
and its imperviousness to other ideas.I want to argue that it is now time for
us to make a major shift in ourthinking about the
environment, similar to the shift that occurredaround the
first Earth Day in 1970, when this awareness was firstheightened.
But this time around, we need to get environmentalism out ofthe
sphere of religion. We need to stop the mythic fantasies, and weneed
to stop the doomsday predictions. We need to start doing hardscience
instead.There are two reasons why I think we
all need to get rid of the religionof environmentalism.First, we need an environmental
movement, and such a movement is notvery effective if it
is conducted as a religion. We know from historythat
religions tend to kill people, and environmentalism has alreadykilled
somewhere between 10-30 million people since the 1970s. It's nota
good record. Environmentalism needs to be absolutely based inobjective
and verifiable science, it needs to be rational, and it needsto
be flexible. And it needs to be apolitical. To mix environmentalconcerns
with the frantic fantasies that people have about one politicalparty
or another is to miss the cold truth---that there is very littledifference
between the parties, except a difference in panderingrhetoric.
The effort to promote effective legislation for theenvironment
is not helped by thinking that the Democrats will save usand
the Republicans won't. Political history is more complicated thanthat.
Never forget which president started the EPA: Richard Nixon. Andnever
forget which president sold federal oil leases, allowing oildrilling
in Santa Barbara: Lyndon Johnson. So get politics out of yourthinking
about the environment.The second reason to abandon
environmental religion is more pressing.Religions think they know it all, but
the unhappy truth of theenvironment is that we are
dealing with incredibly complex, evolvingsystems, and we
usually are not certain how best to proceed. Those whoare
certain are demonstrating their personality type, or their beliefsystem,
not the state of their knowledge. Our record in the past, forexample
managing national parks, is humiliating. Our fifty-year effortat
forest-fire suppression is a well-intentioned disaster from which ourforests
will never recover. We need to be humble, deeply humble, in theface
of what we are trying to accomplish. We need to be trying variousmethods
of accomplishing things. We need to be open-minded aboutassessing
results of our efforts, and we need to be flexible aboutbalancing
needs. Religions are good at none of these things.How will we manage to get
environmentalism out of the clutches ofreligion, and back
to a scientific discipline?
There's a simple answer:we must
institute far more stringent requirements for what constitutesknowledge
in the environmental realm. I am thoroughly sick ofpoliticized
so-called facts that simply aren't true. It isn't that these"facts"
are exaggerations of an underlying truth. Nor is it that certainorganizations
are spinning their case to present it in the strongestway.
Not at all---what more and more groups are doing is putting out islies,
pure and simple. Falsehoods that they know to be false.This
trend began with the DDT campaign, and it persists to this day. Atthis
moment, the EPA is hopelessly politicized. In the wake of CarolBrowner,
it is probably better to shut it down and start over. What weneed
is a new organization much closer to the FDA. We need anorganization
that will be ruthless about acquiring verifiable results,that
will fund identical research projects to more than one group, andthat
will make everybody in this field get honest fast.Because
in the end, science offers us the only way out of politics. Andif
we allow science to become politicized, then we are lost. We willenter
the Internet version of the dark ages, an era of shifting fearsand
wild prejudices, transmitted to people who don't know any better.That's
not a good future for the human race. That's our past. So it'stime
to abandon the religion of environmentalism, and return to thescience
of environmentalism, and base our public policy decisions firmlyon
that.